09/18/2012

Eight Stories

IA whirlwind came through a small town somewhere north of Wichita. Some say it was Sedgwick. It came in from the North-West, there along the river and rolled through the otherwise flat, building-pimpled plain. Not much was displaced, except two neighbors. They lived across the street and had never met until the incident.

No one knew exactly what the damage was, not yet, except for them. The winds had ravaged his home and crushed her car. He lost a cat, she a dog. They met, due to these losses, somewhere in line at town hall. Both of them were there to cancel city payments or transfer accounts.

"Excuse me," she tapped. He turned and handed her a pen. He had seen she needed one, or assumed it as he watched her rummage through a small, albeit heavy purse. "Thanks," she grinned, and asked him see that lightning?He had. It was unavoidable, there in the sky. Bright and green, spreading somewhere above the stratosphere. He had thought he had seen a transformer explode, and he wasn't sure, he told her.

So he showered at her place later that week after they had been at the park all day, sweating uncontrollably and drinking iced peach cider from a thermos. He came out with a grin on his face, his hair slightly damp and still spiked from the towel's drag. She had prepared lunch and was waiting for him, there at the table. His smile turned to a frown, slowly and then suddenly like the weighted ancient bridge that sags until it collapses.

"Are you okay?" "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine." He hadn't told her he was leaving town. In fact, he was leaving the state. He had a few weeks, he thought, before it'd be appropriate to break the news. But there, with the poppies from a bagel all scattered across a plate, he couldn't hold it in.

"Can we go for a walk?"

IISo she cried on lists. The ink spread through the melting paper, little hyphens became tildes. When she finished writing and wiping her eyes, she sealed the list in an envelope. She marched diagonally, arms swinging, across the street. Her eyes were visibly red to the construction worker who took a smoke break to lean on a tired chimney.

The construction worker turned to his buddy who stuffed his face with a sauceless, lettuce packed end of a sub. "See that chick?" "Whuhm?" The buddy chewed and chewed, raised his drink and sipped from a straw. Sluuurp, gulp. "Pardon?" "Nevermind," the construction worker dragged hard and flicked his cigarette down a caved in part of the roof. The curling smoke faded passed the avalanched shingles, passed the absent second floor and into the only standing piece of furniture, shining there in the middle of this sun-lit hole. Sparks flew up the rolled sides of an ugly pink claw-foot tub. And the buddy goes, "Di'ja make it?"

So the envelope slipped into the mail slot and she walked back into the sun, onto the asphalt. She heard something that stopped her right on top of a man hole in the middle of the cul de sac. She turned, glimpsed the vast empty plain beyond the row of short shrub lining the round, and faced the noise.

"What's this?" The door had opened and he was standing there, back lit from the hole. The light broke the house-cast shadow, and he started to open the envelope. "Do I want to do this?"

"I hope so," she said and walked to him. He shredded the crease with his finger and removed the blotted paper. They stood there, the sun barely setting, and read the letter.

Roller-coasters, and rockstars. museums, art schemes. This is how he imagined it much later in life, as a poem, even though it was written like: -Roller~coasters -[That one local band no one outside of Sedgwick has heard of] ~Fly a plane! Fancy dinner in the control terminal at KAM! -Drink wine, melt the bottles into drinking glasses. Fill a field with home made light-poles. Collage, shirts, anything! Something physical that lasts.

III So she ran and she sweated. The pack on her back trapped the heat and if it hadn't been there, you could have seen her skin through her shirt. It must have been 102 degrees out, but she pushed her legs up off the concrete and felt the air cool the beads. When she got to the old farmhouse, she knocked on the door and was let inside.

A boy led her indoors and sat her down on a tattered pink couch. She asked him if she wanted a drink. She had just picked up a bottle of whiskey from the store and planned to drink it later that night in celebration of her life, things she had done and things she was so close to doing.

"No, I'm okay," he said and smiled. "So what's up? Why did you want to talk?" She feared the smile and question begged for something she couldn't offer ever again.

"Well, I have news you might not like. I don't know." He laughed, asked, "Do I need to get tested?" "No!" "Do you have AIDS, or herpes?" She laughed because he was joking but she said, "No! I just said no!" anyway. "I started seeing someone." "Oh yeah," he said with a raised eyebrow. So they sat there and she explained that she had wanted him to know before anyone else told him. Told him about this rollercoaster in Wichita that had trees all around it and grass growing up through it. It was an ancient thing, she said, and it rattled and shook. "Well I'm glad you're happy." "It gets worse." "Do you have cancer? Are you dying?" "No, I'm not dying. I think I might be moving." She sat there, the shaking box fan giving her a headache. "Well, thank you for telling me." "Of course. I wanted you to know."

She left the house knowing there was nothing his smiles could beg for now. They were both in better places. They both wanted each other to be happy and that was all that mattered.

IV They sat in his car waiting for the rain to pass before entering the park. Dark tendrils of black and grey hung from the sky like fingers reaching to pick up the lot's lot. The wind picked up and a stop sign rocked in it until it had wiggled out of the ground and started sliding under and into cars. They were reclining , lying, looking into each other.

"So like, when you learn a new word and then hear it for the rest of the week. That feeling. It's called Red Truck Syndrome, have you heard that before?" She shook her head, No. Somehow there were these little things one of them had never done or heard of that the other had, and they were constantly excited to teach.

She sat up suddenly and looked passed him. He kept fixed on her and asked, What?! He twisted his leaning body to the window. A man had parked next to them and was locking his truck. It had stopped raining, and you could see the beads beginning to roll off. "Like that? That truck is red, right?" "Yeah," he whispered, "like that."

Ridiculous as it seemed to the people they told over the next few days, weeks, months, and much later in their last years, this was not the only truck. During the next few minutes, a second and third red truck parked beside and in front of them. The sun revealed itself and the red shined bright and blinding. There, across the lot and rolling, an antique Ford- red with one of those oversized black and white license plates. It parked and a girl got out. She was wearing a suit that looked like a teddy bear, holding its smiling head under her arm. She would have hair wet from sweat by the time she reached the other end of the parking lot. In her head, she was writing her famous series of short stories which she would title Clarinets.

So they sat in his car for a few minutes, puffing cigarettes and giggling smoke. She dropped her cigarette and cursed, Shit! He smiled to himself as she pawed at the floor, her hair draped. He wanted to tell her how he felt about leaving her behind. That all this time together was killing him. She sat up and looked at him and his eyes just deflagrated into something she thought neurotic. "What?"

He couldn't speak, but later told her she should come with him to Richmond. She agreed.

V His phone vibrated in his pocket and he assumed someone had texted him. He clutched it and looked. It was dark and pressing the buttons did nothing. He guessed all of the alarms he never changed or removed, that went off constantly at work, killed the battery.

There was a story on the radio about a man in cardiac arrest. A stranger saved this man's life just by knowing and performing CPR. He looked to his coworker and said, Everyone should know CPR. I want to get certified. I mean, can you imagine helplessly watching a loved one die in front of you because you don't know something as simple as CPR?He could only think of losing his girl. He remembered the night before when he was falling asleep, rambling about falling in love and scaring the shit out of her. When he woke up that day, this day, she had gone.

The coworker stopped chopping onions and laid her knife down to wipe her tears, looked over at him and said, "I watched my sister die. Respiratory failure."

The blood and oxygen filled strings suspending his heart snapped and it went crashing into every rib in his chest before melting in the pools of acid in his stomach. I am so sorry, he told her.

He imagined closed eyes above an unmoving mouth that gawped between bespeckled cheeks, clamy and cold. He imagined holding a heavy head of hair, helpless. Kneeling on the side of a road in a field, in the middle of nowhere.

"My other sister died of cancer," she said, solemn. "But there was nothing we could do about that. But I know what you mean."

His heart began to hurt. He went to the bathroom to splash water on his face and sip from the fountain. Neither of these halted the collapsing muscle in his chest. It kept on as he looked in the mirror. His face was drawn down into the automated sink, down into the nadir of pipes and sewage below his feet. He couldn't breathe. He too, was scared as shit.

After he left work, he spent the rest of the day alone, busying himself with the menial. He went to the grocery store and saw cold jets misting wilting lettuce . Searching for a good head, he realized a crippling fear he had never experienced, one that separated the warm from the cold. One that made everything else seem so insignificant. There was no keeping anything forever.

VII He had spent all day packing, finding things he had forgotten. A wooden box with fake jewels hot-glued to the outside and a dragon with golden wings painted on the lid, that someone had made for his birthday. A box of negatives, people he didn't know anymore smiling back at him with black teeth. A collection of CDs his grandmother owned before she passed-- Stan Kenton and Otis Redding at the top of the stack.

He had spent all day putting these things aside, in boxes to give away or to sell. He went to throw a polaroid into the pile when he realized it was her. He held it up to the light. She was wearing baggy polk-a-dots and big shades. She looked like she belonged in a different time, especially with the faded brown of the film. She was looking away from the camera, at something out of view, maybe a car passing. He put the picture on the floor next to him so she was looking his way. He smiled.

Later, they met up at a bar with dim lights that lit cobblestones through long, tall windows. He couldn't think of anything to talk about, except the future.

"If you could plan the future, like if you were God, where would we be in five years?" She asked him.

He replied with something like Richmond, Atlanta, Barcelona, Married, Kids. He stopped there and laughed, smirked, sipped his drink. But who knows, we might move to Richmond and you'll find out you're not that into me or I can't handle the humidity.

Her furrowed brow now clouded the room.

He went on, "You might just stop lik-"

She interrupted him so quick, "I'm in love with you."

The room froze. Or burned up. Everyone melted or evaporated behind her. The walls crumbled and the moon fell into the earth, bursting into sparkling dust.

"And those worries about the future, those things you think might happen. That day is not today."

He knew without a doubt in his heart that he had always wanted someone like her.

VIIIShe looked at her resume and frowned. She let it glide back and forth to the floor where it stayed for the day. She had applied to thirty jobs in Richmond since he asked her to move there. They all said the same thing-- Give us a call when you're in town.

Thunder rolled through the dusty town of Sedgwick again. The power flickered in her room.

Stubborn or smart, but utterly scared he'd leave and forget her in the unremarkable place they had met, she refused to move until she had a job. This meant an increasing inadequacy that started tiny but inflated to eclipse everything she had come to know in the past months.

She looked at the last cigarette in the pack she told herself would be the last. It had been in her bag for days and it was bent and crinkled along the white. She thought it lonely, that all the other cigarettes had left it behind, burned up, transformed. Turned to ash and grew wings, like butterflies, and flew away.

Her mother once told her a story about childhood. Her mother's brother had been teasing and threw a sock out the window. It caught the wind and hung behind the car. Her mother scrambled for the other sock and tossed it out the window, too. She watched from the window as both socks found a spot near the side of the highway, in some swampy ditch where they'd soak in the mud and fray with time-- forgotten but together. She thought her mom less crazy than she had as a child watching her take the pills and sleep deep through the days.

The power flickered again.

She took the cigarette and put it in her lips, pretended to smoke it like a kid would with a toothpick. It smelled stale, but she lit it anyway. She puffed and puffed, looked around the room, all the things she had to leave behind, but hadn't yet left.

The room spun as she lied down. Next to her head on the hardwood, her phone began to vibrate. Her eyes were closed and she could feel it shake her teeth. She grabbed it and held it above her, her arm outstretched to a ceiling full of pale green stars. The area code on the phone was 8-0-4; Richmond.

Thunder boomed and the power went off. The pale green galaxy before her now glowed. The phone in her hand was a worm hole to another place and another time. She opened it and peered inside.

IXSopping globs pounded the windshield for hours. They squinted through the rain and went real slow. Behind them, Sedgwick went about its business. Their friends went to work, went out and drank. Their families made dinner and sat together. Their homes were vacant for a few more weeks, and their jobs hired new people.

It wasn't until the border of Virginia that the clouds had cleared. In fact, they marveled, it was exactly the border of Virginia. The rain had stopped moments before and the sun cracked the sky as they passed the bright red cardinal. They curled around the mountains and made it to Charlottesville where they stopped for coffee. It was late and they were tired. But they sat and smiled about the new life that was an hour or two away.

Before them, Richmond held a wonder they had not yet known, having never left the small and dusty town that raised them slowly from larvae to winged beasts. The city they had left behind had nothing of Richmond's beauty in the Summer, and none of its dreadful grey in the Winter. Richmond was a small, sometimes empty feeling city, but compared to Sedgwick, it held a wondrous exploration neither of them could have prepared for.

By the time they had slept their first night in Richmond, the light began to change and the leaves began to turn. It was the end of their last summer tied to a time they thought would never end, and it was the beginning of the rest of everything.